The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.
Processes of avoiding the world within in order to try to regulate your behavior, or becoming entangled in your thoughts interfering with your ability to take advantage of what's around you, or losing contact with your values for fear that you'll know more about the places where you hurt - those kinds of processes are just normal psychological processes. And if you take the mode of mind that works great in 95 percent of your life and apply it within, it then implodes. It starts creating barriers, and that's true at work, it's true in our culture, true in our politics.
That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.
Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.
The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial.
What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.
Now, the Clinton campaign, you must understand something about the Clintons, and it's true of [Barack] Obama, and it's true of most Democrats. They are always in campaign mode. Even after they win elections, they stay in campaign mode in terms of how they reach people.
For a very great many years, I asked this question: ‘To communicate or not to communicate?’ If one got himself in such thorough trouble by communication, then of course one should stop communicating. But this is not the case. If one gets himself into trouble by communicating, he should further communicate. More communication, not less, is the answer.
There is a world of communication which is not dependent on words. This is the world in which the artist operates and for him words can be dangerous unless they are examined in the light of the work. The communication is in the work and words are no substitute for this.
On Facebook, Twitter, texting, e-mails, remember, it's a mode of communication, it is not communication. It's not real life. So step aside, make sure people see something other than the top of your head and live in real time, in the real world.
I couldn't get a job acting all the time and there were down periods where I could take photographs or paint. I got into a lot of trouble when I was young, from making two films with James Dean, watching him work and then him dying and thinking I could turn down work. There was a big difference, he was a star and I wasn't. So I got in a lot of trouble and was essentially banned from Hollywood.
Most Americans never work as hard as when they're trying to appear normal, and in New Orleans, we just don't bother with that.
One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.
We make thousands of decisions everyday in automatic mode without a mistake. Yet we don't reflect and celebrate this wonderful mode of human decision making at work rather, we put the blow torch on the one moment when it doesn't work and something goes wrong.
I'm just in work mode, and that prevents me from going into the Hollywood starlet mode, I suppose.